Around the world, televisions may be found in billions of homes. However, no one even knew what a television was 100 years ago. In fact, just a few thousand Americans owned televisions in 1947. How did such a revolutionary device go from a niche invention to a living room staple?

We used to have mechanical televisions before we had electric televisions.

Bebusiness tells us that the first televisions were introduced in the early 1800s. They entailed scanning images mechanically and then transferring them to a screen. They were primitive in comparison to modern televisions.

A rotating disc with holes organised in a spiral pattern was used in one of the first mechanical televisions. Two innovators, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird and American inventor Charles Francis Jenkins, worked independently on this gadget. Both gadgets were created in the early twentieth century.

Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a 21-year-old inventor, invented the world's first electronic television. Until he was 14, the inventor lived in a house without electricity. He started thinking about a system that could collect moving images, convert them to code, and then send them across radio waves to various devices when he was in high school.

Farnsworth was far ahead of any mechanical television system that had been devised up to that point. Using a beam of electrons, Farnsworth's method captured moving images.

Between 1926 and 1931, mechanical television inventors continued to tweak and test their creations. However, they were all doomed to be obsolete in comparison to modern electrical televisions: by 1934, all TVs had been converted into the electronic system.